Thursday, November 6, 2008

The Nintendo Seal of Quality

Official word has come out that Monolith Soft's Disaster: Day of Crisis, published by Nintendo in Japan and Europe, may not see a North American release due to NOA President Reggie Fils-Aime's dissatisfaction with the game's quality. Not having played it, I can't really dispute Reggie's assessment, but, based on the previews, it had seemed that, as a non-port, non-casual game, Disaster was very much the sort of title that the Wii needed.

Nintendo has had no problem allowing third parties to flood the library with all manner of trash, usually containing the words "Petz," "Party," or "Game" in the title. Anybody who has ever scanned the Wii aisle at the electronics store has undoubtedly been cruelly awakened to an overwhelming majority of unfamiliar titles too numerous and too generically awful to have ever merited any sort of press. Clearly, the old Nintendo Seal of Quality is a thing of the past, having been stealthily replaced with the current "Official Nintendo Seal," which instills far less confidence.

It seems highly inconsistent to me that NOA should allow its console to be overrun with third-party assembly-line dreck, while being so conservative with the Nintendo name as publisher. Hopefully, Disaster will perform well enough in Europe to convince Reggie of its potential, as I'm still very interested in playing it. Failing that, maybe Nintendo could be convinced to let a third party release it here, as was the case with Cubivore on the GameCube, released in North America by Atlus.

4 comments:

Sam Kahn said...

According to Wikipedia, Reggie Fils-Aime said NOA would wait to see how the game did commercially in Europe before considering a US release. Where did you read about the quality issue? This news is also disappointing to me... I wanted to play this game. There's far too much shit on the Wii.

Czardoz said...

You know, they put that seal on Stunt Race FX. Shameful.

They should call it the "Nintendo Seal of Quality or lack thereof." Cover all the bases.

Horsez anyone?

Henry said...

The "Reggie hates Disaster" story was elaborated upon in the last episode of IGN's Nintendo Voice Chat podcast. He reportedly didn't think it was a $50 product and was especially displeased with the game's audio.

Sam Kahn said...

Haha, the first three Silent Hill games sound like the voice audio was recorded in an empty warehouse with the microphone hidden inside a cereal box and those games seemed to do just fine.